Facebook recently launched a new (Newsfeed Only) ad type called “Multi-Product Ads”. As the name suggests, these ads allow you to promote up to 5 products or services with unique destination URLs in one ad.

Although their intended purpose is to showcase different products or services, who’s to say that we can’t get creative with their use? As long as your campaign objective is set as “Clicks to Website” or “Website Conversions”, you can use the additional images and URLs in a variety of ways. Below are just a few that we are excited to start testing.

1. Show Multiple Images For The Same Product

Rather than displaying a single image of several product, why not show multiple images of the same product?

If you’re selling a clothing item — let’s say a tie — you could show: a medium-range shot of the tie, a close-up shot of the tie’s pattern or design, and 2-3 images of someone actually wearing the tie. By the time they’ve scrolled through your ad, a potential customer has a very clear picture of what this tie is all about.

While clothing is a logical place to start, this same concept applies to countless products. Whether you’re selling cars, sofas, hotel rooms, food, or virtually any other product, you now have five times as much real estate to show it off.

2. Use Them Like Sitelinks for Facebook

If you’re familiar with Google ad extensions, you’ll understand the value of Sitelink extensions. Just like Google’s Sitelink extensions, Facebook Multi-Product ads are a great way to show more details about your product, service or company, and provide direct links to that information on your site.

For example, if you are promoting an event, you could use a Multi-Product ad to provide relevant details about the event in order to remove friction from the buying process. Think of all the information that a potential customer would need before making a decision about whether or not to attend: ticket prices, event schedule, travel information, etc. (see example below). If you were to use the standard, single image ad, you would have to either rely on the customer to find these details on your site, or run separate ads for each topic and hope that they reach the right person at the right time. Now, you can create separate images and URLs for each topic and run them all in one ad, removing barriers and frustration.

The same applies for virtually any business: Think about what information your potential customers need before they can take your desired action, and provide them with links to all of those details in one ad.

3. Advertise Your Multiple Locations

If you’re a restaurant, retail store, car dealership, or any business looking to generate foot traffic in multiple locations, this can be a very powerful tool.

As an example, let’s say you’re a restaurant owner looking to increase lunchtime sales at each of your 3 locations. You can use the ad text to quickly highlight your offer (“Joe’s Has 10 Lunch Specials Under $8! Visit Our 3 Convenient Locations!), and use your images to show off your locations.

Each image could include a photo of the outside of your restaurant, with the supporting text sharing info on the location (Downtown, Main Street, East Side, etc.). You could schedule these ads to run only during the morning, to plant the lunchtime seed with people in your target market.

Regardless of what you use these multi-product ads for, they should provide solid hypotheses to test in your copy, creative and strategies across all networks. For example, if you’re selling pizzas and you see an image of a delicious pizza in the oven is clicked on more than when it’s shown on the dinner table or mid-bite, perhaps that says that your audience is looking for “hot, fresh out of the oven pizza”. Test that copy in your next ad test! Great, now I’m hungry.

Below is a weekly roundup of design articles I pulled this week that I thought were A) very interesting or B) useful in our PPC world. Comment below with your thoughts on the articles or what you would like to see in next weeks Design Dish.

Do use a balance of clean, airy form design with condensed information

Do place the form above the fold and surrounded by supporting content that will encourage the user to proceed

Do use trust badges that speak to data security or product guarantees to speak to the potential concerns of your customers

Do use effective form messaging: “It needs to establish why someone should complete the form, how to complete it, and what happens next”

Do use an active call to action that focuses on a positive outcome of the form submission. Also use a contrasting color on the button to make it pop and draw the users eye to the desired action.

7 Cheat Sheets Every Content Creator and Editor Should Bookmark
As a content creator for my company, and for my own personal hobbies, I am always looking for things that will make my life easier and my tasks more manageable. Anything that I come across that could potentially optimize my process is immediately getting bookmarked and referenced daily. This article, put out by kapost, has turned me on to a few new tools for my design arsenal. Included in the article is a social media image guide, an HTML cheat sheet, the best times to post on social media, and a proofreading checklist.

Where Should You Start Testing?
A very insightful article helping the reader work through where they should run their first tests, and the answer is: where it hurts the most, and where you can learn the fastest. Once you’ve figured out where you should run your tests, you have to decide what to test on those pages. The biggest take away: “Ignore generic advice. Your job is to figure out what specific problems the pages in questions have.” There is no one size fits all solution when it comes to testing. Get some insight into the doubts and hesitations that YOUR audience has on YOUR page, and then come up with a test hypothesis to address those issues.

Featured Website Design: ibrewmyowncoffee.com
I stumbled across this website through a design spotlight on Panda (a daily news and inspiration app). What stuck out to me, other than being an entire site about brewing coffee, was how minimal it was in its design. It only uses three colors, white, black and blue to break up the sections. Yet, it doesn’t come across as boring. The typeface selected complements the architecture of the design and the information is displayed in an easily digestible way. The color changing navigation bar, and strike-through text, gives just enough animation to keep your attention during the scrolling and navigation through the site. Everything is laid out in a clean, simple way that makes sense. I think its refreshing to see a website that seems so minimal, yet it works. I think it’s easy to get caught up in adding different elements to a page to “spice things up,” but ibrewmyowncoffee.com proves that when you strip all of that extra fluff away you can be left with something that works a hell of a lot better.

We’ve known for a while that display ad impressions and social media ad impressions have value. But without solid data, how do you explain that to direct response and lead generation marketers that demand high Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) and exact Cost Per Lead data?

The truth is, until recently, we couldn’t. Not without huge data sets and proprietary attribution modeling software…things that most (okay, all) of our clients don’t have.

Here are the key findings from the study, but I would encourage you to download and read the entire report to get the full story.

Facebook and display advertising are significantly undervalued and on
average deliver 830% more revenue than anticipated once measured
accurately with multi-touch attribution.

Given most advertisers have very mature search marketing programs
that offer little opportunities for additional incremental growth, display
advertising in general represents one of the most attractive growth
opportunities.

Facebook advertising in particular still holds significant growth potential
compared to other more established channels as it provides a high
average ROAS yet comparatively does not receive a lot of media spend.

While Facebook and display advertising do generate clicks, they are
not typical direct response channels, but instead indirectly influence
conversions and build awareness that is then captured further down the
purchase path by other channels such as search.

Search, whilst important in capturing awareness generated by display
advertising or other channels, is overvalued in the amount of impact it
has on the consumer purchase decision.

Our experience with trying to explain attribution modeling and assisted conversions is that clients really only understand last click metrics. Even those that believe in the value of display impressions are more likely to max out spending in last-click channels first (primarily search), before spending on display or social ads.

As the industry begins to accept and integrate display & social contributions to ROAS, it becomes incumbent on agencies like ours to understand how and when to shift media dollars from direct response to branding and awareness channels to boost the overall performance of a campaign. Looks like we have a lot of work ahead of us in 2015!

As communities grow, it often becomes harder to keep track of who’s new, who’s returning after a hiatus, and the backgrounds of people that you are interacting with. The #ppcchat community is no different. Not only has the audience grown considerably over the past year, but the content and format has become increasingly useful as the “wisdom of the crowds” kicks in. There’s still room for n00bs but it feels like we have reached a critical mass of active contributors.

Since it helps to know who you are talking to, we put together a very brief, informal (read: not scientific) survey of #ppcchat users. We asked a few basic demographic questions and received 30 responses. None of the data below are statistically significant, but there are some interesting nuggets of data that would be interesting to extrapolate to the entire PPC community (whether or not they participate in #ppcchat).

Here’s what we learned…

Geographic Distribution of #ppcchat Contributors

Folks tune in from all over the world! It’s great to see so many countries and continents represented. PPC is different by country, time zone, and across cultural divides. Personally, I’d like to hear from more non U.S. participants, but it seems that there is no easy way to pick a time slot that works for people across time zones.

#ppcchat User Locations

#ppcchat Job Titles

Job titles are nearly impossible to compare across companies, so we didn’t even try. A Director at one company could be a Specialist or Manager at another. The best we could do is a simple word cloud showing the most prominent titles from our survey respondents.

PPC seems to be slightly more prominent than Search, Online, or Digital, and we even have one Anarchist in our midst!

#ppcchat Job Titles

Company Type & Company Size

Perhaps a little more telling about #ppcchat folks are the types and sizes of companies that we come from. Again, this data set is not large enough to draw any significant conclusions, but it does seem pretty clear that most of us are in some sort of PPC or digital marketing agency, with healthy representation from in-house marketers and independent PPC pros.

My hypothesis is that agency folks have a little more leeway in our schedules and incentive to contribute to (and learn from) #ppcchat so we might be over-represented as a percentage of the actual PPC universe.

#ppcchat Company Type

Company size ranges dramatically, but most of us are in small-to-midsize companies (1-100) with a pretty healthy group of large/enterprise PPC’ers. Definitely some different challenges and opportunities in the enterprise space, but the day-to-day PPC tactics are often the same.

#ppcchat Company Size

So, What Did We Learn?

It’s hard to draw a lot of insights from a small sample size, but the #ppcchat contributors are as diverse as any group of data geeks can be. We come from companies large and small, countries far and near, but we all speak the same language.

I am constantly amazed at how helpful and sincere the PPC community is. In a world where we focus so much on competition and out-performing our (or our clients’) competitors, we certainly do share a lot of information. This, in my opinion, is what has helped the #ppcchat community survive and thrive.

Thanks to all who submitted their survey responses, and especially thanks to Matt and James for organizing and MC’ing each week. It has certainly helped our team feel more connected to the PPC world!

Remember the sheer TV genius that was MTV’s Pimp My Ride? When it came to customizing cars, there was not a paint job too outlandish or shag carpet too tacky for Xzibit and his crew at West Coast Customs. Well, move over Xzibit – Google’s new Ad Customizers are giving you a run for your money! As exciting as Ad Customizers are, they can be a bit scary. That’s why we put together this rundown on what exactly they are, how they work and a few examples of how you can put them to use. Think of this as an Ad Customizer FAQ.

If at any point you feel your inner Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank coming out, feel free to say “Stop the madness!” and scroll down to the examples (with images) provided below. Seeing these bad boys in action can really make it all come together.

What Are Ad Customizers?

Think Dynamic Keyword Insertion on steroids: Using a series of parameters, Google automatically updates your ad, in real-time, by inserting a keyword, countdown timer, or any other information that you want. That means you upload one ad and get nearly unlimited variations, automatically. Pretty cool right?

Where Can I Use Ad Customizers?

You can use Ad Customizers in any text ad on the Google Search or Display Networks. They can be used in any part of the ad except for the display URL.

How Do They Work?

Ad Customizers work using parameters that sit within brackets {like this}. These parameters get replaced in real-time by information that you have previously designated using Ad Customizer Data, COUNTDOWN functions, or both.

How Are The Parameters Structured?

Parameters are made up of two parts; a data sheet reference and a column reference.

What Is Ad Customizer Data?

Ad Customizer Data is a spreadsheet that you upload into the Business Data section of your Shared Library within your Adwords account. (You can download Google’s CSV template here). The spreadsheet must be uploaded as a .csv, .tsv, .xls, or .xlsx file.

What Goes In The Data Sheet?

The Data Sheet is made up of columns containing information like price, models or any other relevant data. You tell Google how to format the data by listing one of four attributes in parentheses next to your column headers: text, number, price, or date.

What Kinds Of Things Can I Use As Customizers?

Here are the Ad Customizer standard attributes. Of course, you can add any type of data you want, but these are the essentials.

How Do I Target My Ad Customizers?

Google locates the appropriate Ad Customizers by referencing specific keywords, ad groups, campaigns or your entire account. You set this in advance by including targeting columns like “Target Keyword” in your Data Sheet. If you want your customizers to apply to your entire account simply leave out the targeting columns.

How Do Countdowns Work?

Countdowns work two ways depending on whether you are counting down to one event or multiple. If you are counting down to a single event, simply use the COUNTDOWN function:

{=COUNTDOWN("YYYY/MM/DD 09:00:00")}

UPDATE: Google has launched a tool that allows you to more easily create a one time countdown timer. In order to use this feature you must create the ad in Google AdWords native. When you get to the point in the ad where you want to insert the countdown, simply start typing code like this: {= Once you do this, a drop down (like the one below) will appear then you just fill in the details. If you have multiple one-time countdown ads to create you can then import changes to Google Editor and copy and paste the ad you just created wherever you want.

If you are counting down to multiple events, you’ll need to upload a data sheet with all of the dates and then use the countdown parameter like this:

{=COUNTDOWN(Discounts.CountdownDate)}

How Long Do Countdowns Run?

Countdowns run 5 days in advance of the end date by default and stop afterwards. Start dates can be changed by adding the desired number of days after the function. In the example below, I changed a countdown function to start 3 days in advance of the end date:

How Do Countdowns Interact With Timezones?

Countdowns can either adjust to the user’s timezone (using the COUNTDOWN function) or they can end at a universal point in time (using the GLOBAL_COUNTDOWN function)

COUNTDOWN example – If you’re running a sale that ends at 11pm Eastern and someone in Atlanta sees your ad at at 9pm, they’ll see “Sale Ends In 2 Hours” while someone in LA would see “Sale Ends In 5 hours”.

GLOBAL_COUNTDOWN example – In the example above, the user in Atlanta and LA would both see “Sale Ends In 2 Hours”.

What Happens If A Customizer Breaks or a Countdown Ends?

Google requires you to have one text ad without customizers enabled in any ad group with ad customizers. This serves as a backup in case something goes wrong, a countdown ends or has not started yet.

Breaking up sucks. We’ve all been there. It hurts, even if you’re the one initiating it. The nagging feeling in the pit of your stomach that something just isn’t right. You’re not clicking. The relationship isn’t going anywhere. It has to end.

Just like relationships between people, relationships between PPC agencies and their clients can fall apart. The initial honeymoon period after a new client win can take you to the highest highs while the dreaded, “It’s just not working out” phone call can ruin your week.

If a client doesn’t get what they need from the relationship (i.e. sales, leads, or ROI), they’re going to break up with you.

After 7 years in PPC, I’ve experienced all of this and it is still hard to acknowledge that all good things must come to an end. After a lot of soul searching (and a few cartons of ice cream), I realized there are 3 primary reasons that agencies and clients split up.

Agency Meets Client, Client Meets New Agency

PPC is hard and we don’t always achieve the results we expect for our clients in a reasonable timeframe. I’m not going to lie and pretend like every campaign is a home run. We suffer the occasional strikeout. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually unsatisfied clients will find a hotter agency that can fulfill all of their KPI needs.

I Need My Space

Some of our most disappointing client breakups weren’t over another agency at all. Our clients liked the results and potential so much that they decided to bring PPC in house. We call this, “The Kidney Punch” because things seemed to be going well…until they’re not. We were clicking, you know? Then they decided they didn’t need us after all.

A little bonus – these often turn into “Boomerang” clients that leave briefly then come back when they realize how hard PPC is and how much they need you. We have several former clients that continue to refer high-quality prospects to us. Don’t burn any bridges, ever.

It’s Not You, It’s Me

There’s an often-overlooked (and under-utilized) reverse breakup scenario: agency fires client. Most likely this is due to one of three scenarios:

The scope has exceeded the fee with no room for re-negotiation

Client places unrealistic demands on the PPC agency

Agencies shift course and some clients no longer fit in the roster

I’ve talked with many, many other agency leaders that would fire a few clients if they could. I say you should! There’s no reason to waste time, overload your staff, or sacrifice quality for your other clients. Just like learning to say “No” to new business that might not be a good fit, it’s even harder to walk away from paying clients. Sometimes it has to happen, and I have ended up happier and better off every time we’ve had to exercise our right to terminate a contract.

But it doesn’t have to end on a bad note. Coming soon, check out our next post on How To Gracefully Part Ways With A PPC Client (A Checklist).

Sensationalist journalism has once again found its way into the PPC world. Published on The Guardian earlier today, this article cites a research study conducted by eBay, and leads with the headline, “eBay study warns search ads have ‘no measurable benefit.’”

Come again? You are talking about the same “search ads” that allow you to track ROI down to the penny, right? As egregious of a statement as that headline may be, it is just one of many misleading points made in the article, as well as the study itself. The study’s main point is essentially that bidding on your own brand name — in this case, eBay — is a waste of money, as people looking for you by name will find you anyway. They boldly hypothesize that “users searching for ‘eBay’ are in fact using search as a navigational tool with the intent to go to ebay.com.” In addition to eBay, the researchers used five other well-known brands as examples: AT&T, Macy’s, Ford, Safeway, and Amazon. Once again, their point is that paid ads on those brand names are unnecessary, and that any money spent on those clicks is wasteful.

What they fail to recognize, however, is that eBay and Amazon — and to some extent, the other brands — are the exception, not the rule. For those of us who don’t work for eBay or Amazon, there are plenty of reasons why bidding on your own brand name can be a good idea.

Let’s say, for instance, your air conditioning breaks down on a hot summer day. You’ve used Company X before, so you search for them by name to find their phone number.

Heeding eBay’s advice, Company X doesn’t bid on their own brand name, and instead relies on its strong SEO presence to greet customers. That should be sufficient, right?

Unfortunately, Company X’s competitor is running a huge air conditioning repair special right now, and bids on Company X’s name to see if it can cherry pick any customers. Before your eyes make it down to the organic results, you’re distracted by the competitor’s $50 off coupon, and click on their ad. By simply being willing to spend a few cents on their own brand name, Company X could have have kept you from seeing that offer altogether. There’s no question, some brands don’t need to bid on their own names. The point is, though, protecting your own search engine real estate can be vitally important for some companies. You can also use ads to promote your own special offers, make it easy for customers to call you, and even cross-sell different services with Sitelinks Extensions.

To be fair, the cited study does acknowledge PPC’s value in acquiring new customers, as non-branded searches undoubtedly play a major role in the acquisition process. Unfortunately for all of us, the average reader will see the misleading headline and draw the wrong conclusions.

Reading the article’s comments further proves the wide misconceptions around paid search advertising. Unfortunately (for advertisers AND consumers), it seems many people still don’t fully trust paid search ads.

“Nobody clicks on online ads.”

“I don’t know anyone who clicks on online ads.”

“I hate change and refuse to acknowledge this might be helpful.” (Okay, that one was made up).

Yeah, most people don’t know this, but Google’s billions in annual revenue actually come entirely from the movie, The Internship. (I assume this is clear, but just to be sure… ← that statement is in fact false. Google makes oodles of money off of ads). So have no fear, marketers and business owners; paid search advertising is alive and well, bringing new customers to businesses like yours on a daily basis. Stay the course, and soon you’ll be celebrating like my good friend Pete Weber.

(Unless you’re a competitor of one of our clients, in which case you should disregard this post and stop advertising IMMEDIATELY).

There’s a popular saying, which you’ve likely heard from either your grandfather or Ron Swanson, that states, “a bad workman always blames his tools.” Shooting a triple bogey, for instance, is less about the club, and more about the guy swinging it.

While the right tools will never turn a bad workman into a master craftsman, they can be the competitive advantage that pushes you from good to great. This is especially true in PPC Advertising, as the savviest marketers are the ones who know how to leverage the best industry tools to their clients’ advantage.

In our case, we’ve established close working relationships with our landing page testing provider, as well as our phone call tracking provider. We were fortunate enough to partner with each of them on some really cool projects over the last few weeks.

ifbyphone Mobile Search Webinar

We use ifbyphone for our phone call tracking services, and love the data they provide on our clients’ incoming calls. On April 9th & 10th, Andrew Miller teamed up with ifbyphone for a webinar titled “The 7 Commandments of Mobile Search.”

I’d encourage you to watch the webinar, as mobile search is an increasingly important part of the marketing mix. We’re partnered with ifbyphone on similar projects in the past, and are excited to do so again in the future.

Unbounce Landing Page Case Study

Unbounce, our primary Landing Page Optimization partner, recently included us in a beta test of their new feature, dynamic text replacement. This new feature allowed us to dynamically re-write the text on a landing page based on a visitor’s specific search.

(Hint: to see dynamic text replacement in action, follow the above link, and paste ?fname= to the end of the URL. Then, add your name after the = and press Enter. Pretty cool, huh?)

Again, there’s no substitute for a smart, hardworking PPC team; however, unless you’re taking full advantage of the latest industry tools, you may be missing out on opportunities for your clients, and potentially great partnerships.

Even seasoned SEM managers need help organizing, updating, and analyzing the high volume of data created by their campaigns. It’s simply too much for to handle with spreadsheets alone. Luckily, there are several tools available to help with the mundane tasks and detailed analysis.

AdWords Editor

AdWords Editor

AdWords Editor is a free, downloadable Google application for managing large AdWords accounts efficiently on Windows or Mac computers. Download your campaigns, make bulk changes with powerful editing tools, then upload the changes to AdWords.

Filters & Automated Rules

AdWords Automated Rules

Filter your account statistics to search for the data that interests you the most, such as keyword text, average cost-per-click (CPC), or impressions. Once you’ve created a filter, you can save it for easy access in the future. Automated Rules allow you to take action based on your filter results. For example, you can raise your CPC bids every Tuesday for keywords with an average Cost Per Lead below your target range. Similarly, you can pause and flag keywords with an unacceptable Cost Per Lead to manually review them before allowing them to run again.

Bulk Edits

AdWords Bulk Edits

A relatively new feature in the AdWords web interface that mimics some of the bulk editing capabilities in AdWords Editor (AE). Need to do a quick “Find and Replace” or “Append Text” function for some keywords or ad copy? Bulk edits make it easy. We still find AE to be more useful for large-scale updates, but Bulk Edits can speed up the monotony of making several minor changes to campaigns, ads, or keywords.

Automated Reporting

AdWords Automated Reports

Customize your AdWords reports and have them emailed to you on a regular basis. With automated reporting, you can keep an eye on your most important campaigns, keywords, and ads without the trouble of logging in and re-creating your reports every few days.

Of course, machines can’t completely replace humans (yet), but they can help reduce the monotony and let us focus on the high-level strategies and insights that improve performance and yield more leads.

This past Sunday, the Wall Street Journal ran an article referencing a “crisis” in online advertising. The crisis centers on the increasing prevalence of fraudulent Web traffic, and the price marketers are paying for it.

Without question, fraudulent traffic is a major issue facing digital marketers in 2014. Still, there are several ways to limit the negative impact of fraudulent Web traffic on your online marketing performance.

1. “Invalid Click” reports on Google AdWords & Bing Ads

Google and Bing have very sophisticated measures in place to protect advertisers against “click fraud” or “invalid clicks.” When their system determines that an individual click on your ad was fraudulent, they log it in an invalid click report, and you are not charged for the click. If a certain campaign is regularly receiving invalid clicks, you should consider refining your targeting to exclude offending IP addresses, ad placements, and risky ad networks.

2. Use Cost Per Click (CPC), not Cost Per Impression (CPM) Bidding

As the name suggests, Pay Per Click advertising is inherently less susceptible to fraud, due to the fact that we only pay for clicks, not impressions. By opting for a CPC model, rather than a CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions) model, you remove some of the incentive for inflated and fraudulent impression counts. Because of the systems mentioned above, it’s much tougher for bad actors to fake a click than an impression.

3. Factor some waste or fraud into your estimates

Unfortunately, we’ll never be successful in completely ridding the Internet of fraud. As the WSJ article says, there are far too many real customers online to be scared away by the fake ones. Rather, as marketers, we at times have to factor in a certain amount of “waste” or fraud into our plans. If we’re making our clients $5 or every $1 in ad spend, a small amount of fraud can be tolerated, because the overall spend is profitable.

Perhaps the best point in the article is where the author states that marketers are becoming “more aggressive in monitoring how their money is spent.” It can’t be understated how important it is to closely monitor your online marketing activity. Whether you have the resources to handle it in-house, or need to enlist an agency’s expertise, this should be a priority for 2014.

So, is this really a “crisis,” as suggested? Maybe. But, by taking a few simple steps, you can regain control of your digital marketing presence, and take a stand against fraudulent Web activity.

Why YSA?

1We are PPC specialists, not web generalists.2We work smarter and harder.3We believe in transparent relationships.4We believe clients should own their data.5We know that when our clients win, we win.

From Our Clients

What you have been able to do for our company is truly remarkable. Not only have our internet leads tripled year over year, but your detailed reporting and tracking system has allowed us to reduce advertising expenditures in other less lucrative areas.